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sbs385/ch1011.md

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+California State University Monterey Bay
+
+SBS 385 *Environmental History of California*
+
+California: A History (Starr 2005) Chapter Notes on the themes of
+Science and Technology, Art and Lifestyle
+
+**Chapter 10 O Brave New World!: Seeking Utopia Through Science and
+Technology**
+
+The development of mining technology led to the Pelton turbine, a
+California invention, which in turn brought **hydroelectricity**, which
+in turn made possible an industrial infrastructure. In California,
+**aviation** was adopted and perfected, by the 1920s scientists took the
+lead in **vacuum tube technology**, making possible **radio** and
+**television**, and the 1930s were smashing the **atom**, the 1950s
+through the **semiconductor**, the digital revolution, then came
+**biotechnology**.
+
+In each instance, the specific **scientific, engineering, or
+technological advance** emerging from California was linked to the
+effort to **discover a truth**, **solve a problem**, **make a profit**,
+make **productive use of one’s time**, and, in the process, make the
+world **a better and more interesting place**. Open, flexible,
+entrepreneurial, unembarrassed by the profit motive, California emerged
+as a society friendly to the **search for utopia through science and
+technology**. The **California Academy of Sciences** goal would be the
+“systematic survey of every portion of the state and the collection of a
+cabinet of rare and rich productions”.
+
+A group of Californians led by Frederick Law Olmsted, the noted traveler
+and landscape architect, lobbied through Congress a bill setting aside
+under the protection of the state a huge tract of Sierra land that
+included the Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Big Trees. Camping trips
+became a rite of passage and celebration for Californians eager to
+define to themselves just exactly what California was all about.
+
+John Muir encountered Yosemite and the mountains of California that gave
+rise to a lifetime vocation. He served as the first president of the
+Sierra Club, founded in 1892, and in 1903 camped out in Yosemite with
+President Theodore Roosevelt. He ceaselessly advocated the creation of a
+national park system.
+
+**Geology, mining, astronomy, aviation**: here were some basic
+stimulants to scientific creativity in California. New inventions in
+Palo Alto would soon be making an entirely new world of
+**transcontinental phone calls, radio, television, and high-speed
+electronics** possible. In the first three decades of the 20^th^
+century, Stanford University developed a special expertise in
+**electrical engineering**. Across the Bay in Berkeley, meanwhile, a
+contribution was being made to the most important scientific and
+technological feat of the 20^th^ century: releasing the power of the
+atom, making Berkeley a center for **nuclear research**. Palo Alto had
+become the epicenter of **high-tech venture capitalism**, serving
+Silicon Valley start-ups.
+
+Silicon Valley, as the region triangulated by Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, and
+San Jose soon came to be called, was a place, a culture, a center of
+invention and manufacture that revolutionized society itself by taking
+to new levels the way people communicated, stored and retrieved
+information, analyzed problems, and increasingly, thought. It was as if
+a new neural network had been created for the human race: a digital and
+silicon-based circuitry that extended the capacity of the individual
+human being by linking him or her to a vast ocean of data and to
+software applications capable of driving a myriad of programs for
+navigating that ocean. The introduction to the public in 1983 of the
+**Internet** – in the invention of which California-based scientists
+played key roles – compounded this collective nooshphere (to use the
+terminology of the Jesuit mystic Teilhard de Chardin), this shared and
+integrated community of information. No wonder Silicon Valley companies
+were so different in their organizational structure, so nonhierarchical,
+so quick to cluster talent for specific purposes, then reassemble it for
+another task! **Their very product represented an** **evolutionary step
+forward for the human race**.
+
+Yet so fervent had become this faith in science that 59% of the
+Californians voting in the November 2004 election passed Proposition 71
+authorizing the sale of \$3 billion in bonds over a ten-year period to
+finance state-monitored programs of stem cell research. Bypassing the
+National Institutes of Health, which had been sponsoring biological
+research at the federal level for 117 years, Proposition 71 asserted
+California as a nation-state enamored – beyond considerations of
+theology and/or fiscal prudence in the midst of a continuing budget
+crisis – of seeking utopia through science and technology, which had
+become a way of life.
+
+**Chapter 11 An Imagine Place: Art and Life on the Coast of Dreams**
+
+The 20^th^ century witnessed the debut of **three entertainment media**
+– film, radio, and television – dependent upon electronic technologies
+developed in California. California continued to energize the arts as
+matrix, occasion, and subject, the **arts defined and redefined
+California as an imagined place**.
+
+Robinson **Jeffers** (poet who lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea) took the
+fundamental aesthetic premise of California since the mid-nineteenth
+century, **nature**, and make of it **a lifestyle, a philosophy, and a
+poetic practice**.
+
+John **Steinbeck** (raised in Salinas and studied biology at Stanford)
+saw human life more elemental terms: biologically, that is, as living
+organisms in a landscape, and collectively as “group-man” held together
+by biological linkages.
+
+William **Saroyan** (writer of Fresno and San Francisco) sought to fill
+the void – in his case, the suspected emptiness of the universe itself –
+with his version of that perennial concern of California writers,
+bohemianism, which is to say, the shoring up of threatened identities
+through art and “hanging out.”
+
+Aldous **Huxley’s** *After Many a Summer Dies the Swan* (1939) – which
+some consider the best Los Angeles novel ever – satirizes California’s
+fake promise of youth through the figure of an aging tycoon based on
+William Randolph Hearst. It ends apocalyptically.
+
+This sense of California’s promise betrayed and doom impending provides
+a leitmotif of writing in the postwar period, most notably by
+Sacramento-born Joan Didion. She more than implied that both her
+personal California, in terms of the myths she had absorbed as a child,
+and the larger California experiment contained what she believed to be a
+crippling level of deceit and self-deception.
+
+The **Beats** of the 1950s agreed, with San Francisco becoming the
+epicenter of the movement for City Lights bookstore founder and poet
+Lawrence Ferlinghetti and writer Jack Kerouac (*On The Road*, *Dharma
+Bums*, *Big Sur*). Allan Ginsberg’s poem *Howl*, the poetic manifesto of
+the Beat movement, evoked the anguish of a postwar generation oppressed
+by the soulless materialism of corporate America and took refuge in sex,
+rebellion, and drugs, often to their own destruction. Theirs was a
+style, a posture, an attitude – as much political as literary – toward
+postwar America, which they believed had become corporate, right-wing,
+cold, and conformist.
+
+Gary **Snyder** (poet and UC Davis professor of English) ultimately
+eschewed politics in favor of a **nature-oriented mysticism** that had
+been a persistent theme of imaginative writing in California since the
+frontier. Snyder had from the beginning the ambience of a seeker. He
+spent twelve years studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and also visited India
+in search of enlightenment. As artist, Gary Snyder was the greatest of
+the Beats, a notable American poet of any school, and, in his nature
+orientation and environmentalism, the example *par excellence* of the
+California tradition he represented and fulfilled.
+
+The **Outdoor Life** characterized the California lifestyle since the
+19^th^ century. If California has made any contribution to sport on a
+national level, it is in the democratization of pursuits that were
+previously the prerogatives of elites, **thanks to recreational policies
+of Progressivism**.
+
+Surfing would become an affordable, widespread pursuit, an icon of the
+California lifestyle, celebrated in song, film, advertising, and other
+media, where everyone is forever young and looked great. Mountaineering,
+skiing, rock climbing, windsurfing, hang gliding – at the interface of
+nature and science further reinforced the “DNA code” of California.

sbs385/ch5.md

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+California State University Monterey Bay
+
+SBS 385 *Environmental History of California*
+
+Excerpts from *California: A History* (Starr 2005) CH 5 Regulation,
+Railroad, and Revolution: Achievement and Turmoil in the New State
+
+Who owned the state, anyway? Very few of the original land grantees had
+come through the process with their holdings, it was a significant
+**transfer of wealth**. The question of **land grants** – their origins
+in the Hispanic era, their validity or invalidity, the lives that were
+made or ruined by titles confirmed or denied – emerged as one of the
+important themes of 19^th^ century California, a situation that would be
+compounded when the railroad became the largest landowner. California
+would remain resistant to small farming. Extensive holdings, together
+with the quasi-feudal economy they encourage, continued to dictate the
+structure of agriculture.
+
+Landowners of Southern California argued for a separate territory south
+of San Louis Obispo while statehood was being debated in Washington DC
+as an effort to extend slavery to the Pacific Coast. The real impetus
+behind dividing California came from the fact that the state was truly
+two, and perhaps even four, **distinct places**: the urbanizing San
+Francisco Bay Area and the mining districts; the Far North; the Central
+Valley; and a sparsely settled Southern California, significantly
+Mexican. The question of dividing the state, while it has grown
+increasingly impractical over the years, has never fully gone away.
+
+It was all happening so quickly! Not for California would there be- nor
+would there ever be, as it turned out- a deliberate process of
+**development**. Mining, first gold then silver, paced the foundation
+and first growth of American California. Agriculture was destined to
+dominate the next sequence of development. The hinterlands of San
+Francisco from San Jose to Healdsburg were developing into productive
+farms, Marin had a thriving dairy industry, and in 1859 people were
+extolling the future of vinticulture and wine-making. The **Gold Rush**
+gave a second wind to the cattle industry.
+
+A number of Hispanic males, displaced by the new order, took to the
+hills as bandits (or freedom fighters a later generation would write).
+Prominent **Californios** maintained their positions, but theirs was,
+ultimately, a time of gradual decline: a twilight of splendor that, even
+as it waned, would in the 1880s and 1890s be reappropriated by a
+generation of **Anglo** Southern Californians anxious to graft
+themselves onto the rootstock of a romantic past. As the Civil War
+approached, **Hispanic** sentiment was overwhelmingly **Unionist**, and
+political sentiment in the state was overwhelmingly pro-Union.
+
+It was national policy to extend the **railroad** across the continent.
+The best and winning argument for the project was the outbreak of the
+**Civil War** in April 1861. The Union Pacific was to build westward
+from Omaha and the Central Pacific to build eastward from Sacramento. In
+return, these two companies would be subsidized by an extensive federal
+package of loans, bonds, cash payments, and land grants. In 1864, the
+**incentive package** was increased to allocation of land grants on
+alternate sections, forty miles in length, of the entire line which
+would eventually make the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific, thanks
+to the federal government, two of the largest landowners in the Far
+West.
+
+Four Sacramento businessmen, Huntington and Hopkins (hardware), Stanford
+(groceries), and Crocker (dry goods) were seemingly ordinary men, **the
+Big Four** as history would know them. Stanford, serving simultaneously
+as governor and president of the Central Pacific, broke ground on what
+turned out to be a six year epic of construction. Huntington would take
+care of lobbying in Washington, Stanford would see to state government,
+Crocker would supervise construction, and Hopkins would keep the books.
+
+There were not enough men in California willing to do this sort of
+backbreaking work at the price Crocker was willing to pay. Chinese were
+already marginalized out of mainstream employment and eventually ten
+thousand were employed. They more than proved their mettle against the
+competing Irish workers of the Union Pacific. The lines connected on May
+10, 1869 at Promontory Summit, Utah. What kind of world would this
+postrailroad era be for California, now that it was less than a week’s
+journey from the East Coast? California was now joining the national
+economy, including industrial culture. What would the hundreds of
+thousands of immigrants find? A better life? Or the same dreary,
+grinding poverty that had motivated their immigration in the first
+place?
+
+The decade of the 1870s was not a good time for the nation or for
+Europe, the worst depression thus far in American history. The president
+sent federal troops into a number of cities to contain a series of
+strikes against railroad companies. Marxism was making the transition
+from theory to practice beginning with the foundation in London in 1864
+of the International Workingmen’s Association. The violence of the
+frontier era had not been banished by the railroad. Far from it:
+violence seethed beneath the surface, and Chinese became the scapegoats
+for collapsed expectations.
+
+To understand the growth, one must look at San Francisco from two
+perspectives. It was the dominant urban concentration on the Pacific
+Coast, and was also a maritime colony of the eastern US and Europe. As
+such, it replicated the economic, social, and cultural institutions of
+advanced urbanism. The city began to fill with unemployed and restless
+men. Irish born Kearney told crowds that the capitalists of the city
+were running them into the ground and the Chinese were taking their
+jobs. Was this street theater or real revolution or both?
+
+The revised state constitution of 1879 dropped Spanish as the second
+legal language and a strong anti-Chinese immigration statement was
+adopted. Other provisions included regulation of corporations and
+establishment of a state Railroad Commission. It was considered a
+failure in its refusal to take up the issue of land monopoly. California
+was, for all practical purposes, empty. Where were the flourishing
+cities and townships, the family farms, the signs of human progress and
+civility? Instead, one saw endless steppes, an occasional shack housing
+alien labor. Why was this so? Because so very few people owned most of
+the land in the state. After all the fuss and bother, the riots and
+sandlot rallies, the incendiary rhetoric and pickax brigades, the
+marches and countermarches of state militia and demonstrators, the
+fistfights and gunfire, the four dead bodies, and the overhauling of the
+state constitution, California entered the 1880s as a state in which
+railroads, corporations, and large landowners continued to call the
+shots.